Pagina 32 - BCSV, XXXV, 2005

32 LEON POMPA
disparate and diverse things»52, which Vico made so centrai to thè work-
ings of thè human mind and to thè discovery of thè truth in his early
works but which receives relatively little explicit attention either in De
uno or thè first New Science. The question which is thus raised is that of
thè relation between thè concept of ingenium as developed in Vico’ s
works up to and including De antiquissima and in his later works from
De uno to thè various versions of thè New Science.
This is plainly a much larger subject of enquiry than can be encom-
passed in thè present discussion, so I shall confine myself to considering
it in connection with two points. These are: whether, despite his rather
limited references to it in thè later works, Vico took for granted in them
what he had said earlier about ingenium\ and, whether, if he did so, thè
theory is compatible with his account of thè poetic or imaginative de-
velopment of thè first language.
With regard to thè first of these questions, it is important to pay atten­
tion to Vico’s intentions in introducing thè concept of ingenium in thè ear­
lier works. In De ratione, it is part of a critique of thè Cartesian idea that
criticai rationalism was capable of providing a foundation for all true
knowledge and of providing a correct method for thè pursuit of new em-
pirical discoveries. One of Vico’s many points is that criticism is an art
which presupposes a body of shared belief - common sense - thè existence
of which criticism cannot itself explain, but which depends upon thè per-
ception of similarities and differences. Central to thè exercise of this ca­
pacity, as Vico ascribes it to thè ancients, was thè art of topics, which con-
sisted in a body of rules providing thè ‘categories and indices’ to be used
as clues to thè questions to be asked about problematic matters, so as to
enable us to perceive things as fully as possible and thus avoid thè a priori
restrictions upon thè development of newbeliefs whichwould follow from
thè attempt to conform to thè Cartesian rules of method. What Vico says
about topics and common sense in this work is advanced as part of his cri­
tique of thè arid and inappropriate attempt to make criticism fundamen-
tal to human knowledge, as it had had arisen in his own age. But ifwe were
to ask to which age in thè sequence of ages outlined in thè New Science
could thè relation between thè art of topics and criticism as Vico charac-
terises it here belong, it would clearly be thè third, or fully human age, in
which alone man is said to have thè capacity to examine beliefs critically53.
52 G. Vico, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia [nowDe ant.], in Id., Operefilosofiche, ed.
by P. Cristofolini, Firenze, 1971, chapter IV. See also chapter V, where it is described as «thè
faculty proper to knowledge».
53 Vico s account of thè «barbarism of reflection» in thè New Science of 1744, can be seen